Here are some of the pictures I took at the ECE Show II in London, September 1990.

The fourth part in my blog series about my computer chronicles had these words about it:

I went there on a ship with Niels from Channel 42 and his friend, Henrik. The Ikari guys also went there. I didn’t try to sell our music at the show this time, I was just there for fun. I briefly met Charles Deenen but it was merely to exchange a sentence or two. And just as I feared that we would never find each other at the show as agreed, Deek from Scotland suddenly popped up and introduced himself.

These are the pictures I took at the demo party by Full Force, Contex, The Shadows, Megastyle and Science 451 in Bergenshallen, July 1990 – an indoor ice hockey arena. Still the same awful potato camera.

Here’s a collection of photos from 1988 to 1999 of various oldskool computer freaks, including yours truly. I apologize for the potato quality of the earlier ones – both my camera and my scanner at the time sucked.

JCH sitting by his Commodore 64 in September 1988

Zoolook at JCH’s place in October 1989

Zoolook at JCH’s place in January 1990

Drax sitting by JCH’s Commodore 64 in July 1990

Drax and JO at JCH’s place in July 1990

MSK in JCH’s apartment in April 1996

JCH in his apartment in 1999

JCH in his apartment in 1999

People who know me would probably want me to explain those two last ones. I’ve been overweight most of my life, but around that time I actually managed to lose more than 30 kg.

After composing a few tunes in GoatTracker and CheeseCutter, both editors that use the reSID emulator in Windows, I thought it might be prudent to test them on the real deal. Stein Pedersen (of Prosonix fame) then recommended the SidBlaster, a small device that can be equipped with a real SID chip.

The device is connected to the USB port of the PC and supports the HardSID DLL standard. This makes it compatible with the classic SidPlay, ACID 64 Player Pro, GoatTracker, VICE, and more.

I got in contact with the creator of the Tic Tac design, Andreas Schumm, on Facebook. He created and sent me the device for 83€ via PayPal. I had mentioned that I intended to use it with an 8580 SID chip and all of its jumpers were already set accordingly when I received it. It was also encapsulated in a Tic Tac box.

Earlier that day, I had also received the 8580 SID chip which I had bought on eBay for 33€. I took the device out of the Tic Tac box and put the chip into the socket. On the GitHub page for the device, there was a document about how to set jumpers, how to connect, and various other practical information.

One of the caveats in that document was that I should avoid using USB hubs as they could be trouble. I first tried connecting the device to a USB port on the front edge side of my PC cabinet, but this didn’t work. I had to use a USB port on the back of the PC before it was detected properly. I guess the front edge line of USB ports is actually regarded as sort of an internal USB hub.